Quick post (really should be doing something else). Reading Jeff Atwood's post Mixing Oil and Water: Authorship in a Wiki World lead me to IBM's wonderful history flow tool to visualise the edit history of a Wikipedia page. There's a nice paper describing history flow (doi:10.1145/985692.985765, free PDF here). Inspired by this I decided to try and implement history flow in PHP and SVG.

Given that one response to my post on Fungi in Wikipedia was to say that fungi are also charismatic, so maybe I should try [insert unsexy taxon name here]. So, I've now looked at all the species I extracted from Wikipedia (nearly 72,000), ran the Google searches, and here are the results: Site How many times is it the top hit?

One response to the analysis I did of the Google rank of mammal pages in Wikipedia is to suggest that Wikipedia does well for mammals because these are charismatic. It's been suggested that for other groups of taxa Wikipedia might not be so prominent in the search results. As a quick test I extracted the 1552 fungal species I could find in Wikipedia and repeated the analysis.

Playing a bit more with the Wikipedia mammal data, there are some interesting patterns to note.

Continuing the saga of making sense of the mammal classification in Wikipedia, I've done a quick comparison with the Mammal Species of the World (third edition) classification. MSW is the default taxonomic reference used by WikiProject Mammals.

Following on from my previous post about visualising the mammalian classification in Wikipedia, I've extracted the largest component from the graph for all mammal taxa in Wikipedia, and it is a tree. This wasn't apparent in the previous diagram, where the component appeared as a big ball due to the layout algorithm used.

In the previous post I suggested that a productive way to meet EOL's goal of a web page per taxon would be to build upon Wikipedia, rather than go it alone.

Time for more half-baked ideas. There's been a lot of discussion on Twitter about EOL, Linked Data (sometimes abbreviated LOD), and Wikipedia. Pete DeVries (@pjd) is keen on LOD, and has been asking why TDWG isn't playing in this space. I've been muttering dark thoughts about EOL, and singing the praises of Wikipedia. On so it goes on. So, here's one vision of where we could (?should) be going with this.

One of my pet peeves is how backward natural history museums are in grasping the possibilities the Internet raises. Most electronic displays in museums have low information content, and are doomed to obsolescence. Traditional media (plaques, labels) have limited space, and also date quickly.

Interesting paper by Huss et al. in PLoS Biology entitled "A Gene Wiki for Community Annotation of Gene Function" (doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060175). Essentially, the paper describes using Wikipedia to create a comprehensive gene wiki: Given that the EOL project seems stalled (i.e., the current content hasn't changed), and the existing Wikipedia content is often much richer than EOL's, one has to ask why EOL doesn't give up it's current model